First Democrat to Jump into the 2020 Ring is…Pocahontas!

Undeterred by the avalanche of criticism from both political
sides of the aisle (and the Native American community) that greeted her farce
of a DNA test a couple of months ago, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has
officially announced that she is forming an exploratory committee for the 2020
presidential race. We’re sure such committees have been formed without being
followed by an actual campaign for the White House, but it’s pretty rare that
it happens that way. Most news outlets treated the announcement as a de facto
sign that Warren was going to run for the Democratic nomination, bad press or
no.

“America’s middle class is under attack,” Warren said in a
video sent out to supporters on Monday. “How did we get here? Billionaires and
big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted
politicians to cut them a bigger slice.”

The video shows what most people expected – that Warren
would be filling to populist-socialist gap opened up by Bernie Sanders in the
2016 election. Both senators are laser-focused on turning the ultra-rich and corporate
America into the new “enemy of the people,” and they are both expected to launch
bids for the nomination in 2020. How these two progressives will fare in a
crowded field of contenders remains to be seen, but voters can undoubtedly
expect a wild and wooly primary season.

Unfortunately, if the goal of the Democrats is to woo back
the white working class that Hillary Clinton so badly lost in 2016, it’s
unlikely that Warren is the woman to get them back. She isn’t as SJW-focused as
some of her peers, but her socialist-lite approach to politics is unlikely to
bring jobs streaming back into the Midwest. She may be eager to present herself
as a populist in the Sanders tradition, but she lacks the charisma necessary to
duplicate his phenomenal and surprising success among the youthful left-wing base.

Plus, even if she does, 2016 showed that you can’t win the
nomination with that base alone, and there’s no reason to think that Warren
will do any better with southern blacks than Sanders did. Especially with
people like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, yes, Sanders himself in the mix.
Not to mention good ol’ Joe Biden.

Above all else, Warren is facing a real headwind after that
DNA disaster. It may not seem all that important, but she is now seen as a certified
Ridiculous Person by no small segment of the voting base. If she can get past
that, she will have accomplished a political miracle. We just don’t see it
happening.